A Messiah of the Last Days

by C. J. Driver

  *

  Besides the Free People, there were three other organisations—groups, gatherings, call them what you will—involved in organising the Freedom Congress. The most important was the Youth Action group, which was a breakaway from the Young Socialists; led by one Kelso, its policy was a sort of Mao-and-milk, though Kelso himself was a Trotskyite of rabid heterodoxy and little brain. Another was the strange and amorphous Grass Roots Inc., a gathering of ‘ecologists’, preservationists, pacifists, disgruntled Young Liberals, social workers and the like. Another was the Socialist Alliance, the outstanding characteristic of which was its refusal to ally itself to anyone for longer than a fortnight. The Freedom Congress also had the blessing of the new New Left, with its professors and sociologists, its students and—a handful—its working-class intellectuals.

  A month before it started, as John had promised, the people from Grass Roots Inc. plastered the city with copies of a poster which called on ‘the people’ to Come to the gigantic enormous fabulous FREEDOM CONGRESS. Learn what it’s all about. Hear Kelso Buckleson Lebraski JONAH JONES PLUS POETS, POP, and a GRAND CELEBRATION bring your sleeping bag and stay the night or two, ROUNDHOUSE July 10–11. The Freedom Congress is Free!

  Lebraski I knew to be an ex-Czech who had gone to the U.S.A. before the worst of the persecution of the Jews; three years before, he had left the States and had moved to England, the better, he said at the time, “to view my own society with more light and less heat”; I remember wincing at the awfulness of the cliché. He was one of the theoreticians of the New Left, enormously popular among the young both in the States and in Western Europe; he worked hard, he published a new book every two years, and I could not understand more than five words in ten in any of them. What was perhaps most interesting was that he was apparently a genuine ascetic; certainly he had the head and features of an ascetic, fleshless nose and cheek-bones, gaunt jaw, and he refused all the stimulants he said the young had every right to if they wished. Perhaps it was the contrast between his uncatholicity of opinion and his personal asceticism which made him so attractive—a falcon in a pigsty perhaps. Jonah was a Black Power man, again an American, like most of the Free People really a romantic anarchist who was happier making gestures than taking action; he spent most of his time in the Scandinavian countries when he was not travelling to international congresses to spread the word that Blacks needed Power more than they needed Charity.

  When I announced to Alison that I was going to be away from home for the week-end and why, I think at first she thought I was joking. Indeed, perhaps joking is the best way to explain why I wanted to go. I knew the Freedom Congress would irk me tremendously; I would of course be able to listen to Buckleson, and I was intrigued to set eyes on Lebraski, but Kelso, Grass Roots Inc., Jonah the Black Power, the un-Socialist And-Alliance would certainly be dreadful. Still, I wanted to go; I wanted to see, I suppose, if my experience of the Free People was at all justified. Or am I rationalising? I don’t know. Perhaps if I could understand that dream I could understand my motives better.

  Anyway I went, dressed as anonymously as I could. In fact, I need not have worried, because there were a fair number of people in the crowd who wore suits and sober ties, as I would have preferred; were they all policemen? Williams certainly was there, making no effort to conceal either his person or the fact he was recording all he could in his notebook. Or were they university teachers come to hear the prophet Lebraski? Or simply curious businessmen who thought it sensible to learn the prospects their companies faced? As far as I could tell, the participants—the adherents of the various action groups, organisations, incorporations, and the sundry young who were unattached to any group but members of everything left-wing simply because they were young—took very little notice of the spectators like Williams and the unidentified sober-suits. I number myself with the spectators, though in fact John Buckleson and some of the other Free People made a fuss of me; the cannabis-convicts and poor Streeter, with the love-lorn Edna following him like a tame doe, came to pay their respects too. I looked around for Henderson, in the hope we might be able to stay together and be mutually ironic and occasionally serious, but he wasn’t there.

  An hour late, the Congress started; Kelso welcomed the participants, spectators and the press, and handed over to a pop-group who sang a couple of inaudibly loud songs about freedom. And so to a pop poet, who read only too clearly something about a night he had spent with a negro girl. Or perhaps it was a boy? Some of the lines meant more that way. Or perhaps it was with a negro boy and girl, a poem in praise of white voyeurism. Then Lebraski, I suppose to settle the young down to some theory.

  For it was theory, unadulterated with any notion of how to achieve the youthful Millennium he urged on us. He was not an easy speaker to listen to; he made no concessions to his audience, and read from lecture-notes without sparing a thought for expression or interest. I struggled to listen carefully; I thought the spoken words might clarify the confusion his writing had induced in me—but I got very little. He quoted Bakunin; I remember because in the rest of his speech it seemed a model of orderly syntax and normal vocabulary: “To my utter despair,” Bakunin wrote, “I have discovered, and discover every day anew, that there is in the masses no revolutionary idea or hope or passion; and where these are not, you can work as much as you like but you will get no result.” Then he developed his notion of those three requirements: idea, hope and passion. Under my breath I muttered “faith, hope and charity”, because the phrases seemed to have an alarming similarity and, predictably, Lebraski thought passion more important than either idea or hope. He called on the young to set the world to rights; he gave us some notion of what he thought most needed setting to rights; he explained why he thought the young might do better than their progenitors—his word, not mine; and he gave us not a word about how the Millennium might be achieved, except through wishing hard for its arrival. Revolution was obviously not much cop; after all Lebraski was a Czech, by birth at least, and he had a stake in maintaining that the Russian Revolution had by subverted by Bureaucrats …

  After an hour of an increasingly confusing Lebraski, we had Kelso. I saw him walking through the crowd to the central mike, and he was carrying three large books with him. He had the fixed look of someone about to use this opportunity to explain the whole of human history, and the prospects for mankind in the next couple of centuries. To tell the truth, I didn’t give Kelso a chance to explain anything to me; I grabbed my jacket and fled to the back of the Roundhouse where Tella, ingenious entrepreneur by birth, had set up a stall to sell cokes and hamburgers. I stood there, chatting in a desultory way to Tella and some of the Free People who had decided Kelso ‘wasn’t their scene’, and eating my way through a couple of hamburgers.

  Later, I went back for a moment or two but Kelso was on the second of his sacred tomes by then, quoting early Engels at length, and interpolating his reading with a finger waved in the air and cries of “You see what I mean.” Whatever Kelso was, he was no orator; and I went back to the hamburger stall. Though those of us in retreat there—I noticed that the spectators outnumbered the participants by about two to one—were not entirely out of range of “You see what I mean,” since the mikes were loudly effective, we could at least keep moving.

  And so to lunch—I thanked God I had eaten my hamburgers early, because the stall was suddenly ten or fifteen deep with urgent students and suddenly uncasual hippies demanding ‘six burgers, three with mustard, two with onions, and one with cheese’, and as far as I could tell from my quiet lunchtime stroll round Camden, the local restaurants were of the kind which went in for ‘meat and three veg.’ or for ‘indigenous curry’ or for ‘egg, beans and chips’, with tomato ketchup handed separately. Back to the Roundhouse by two, to find the start had been postponed for half-an-hour, then more poetry, more pop, and at last it was time for John to speak.

  People were standing up to stretch their legs—there were only enough chairs for about half the audience�
�so I did not see John pushing his way through to the platform. Suddenly he was up there, lowering the mike to suit his height, and then standing back from it, very still, waiting for the audience to be quiet. I suppose most people there knew about his speaking, because there was a kind of sigh of expectation as they settled down to listen to him. The audience had been very patient, very polite; and now they were to get at least part of their reward.

  He kept them waiting a long time before he began, long after they were quiet; he simply stood there, and looked. Then he smiled, and walked to the front of the platform, away from his mike, and began to talk. Very quietly, so quietly we had to strain to hear at first; there were three or four thousand people jammed in there, and three or four hundred of them must have had coughs, and another hundred itching feet demanding to be scraped on the floor, and yet he spoke without a mike and without apparently raising his voice above a normal conversational loudness. It was perhaps simply the very quietness, allied to the strange punctuation of pauses and hesitations riding over the syntax of what he said, that made it possible for him to get away with what he said. For it was the shortest speech of the Congress and probably the least clever, at least in the sense of the least learned. I have a recording of that speech; it’s the only record besides my memory I have of all John said in public. There was some bright thing from the Free People who recorded the whole of the Congress and flogged his work later; Tella had a copy made for me, which she gave me months after John was … after he was ended. I’ve got the recording still, but I hardly need it to remember what he said in that quiet, hesitating voice, which was either all pretence or perhaps no pretence at all. But there is nothing I can do to reproduce that long quiet before he began, not even the length of the pauses as he seemed to search for the words he wanted.

  “People say,” he said, “… people say we believe … what we do believe … because we were born … with the … Bomb … the Big Bomb, the one that … burns concrete. People say … what we believe is … Despair … because we think sooner or later some … Presidential psychopath … or Chairman Overkill … in the Whitehouse or Kremlin will …” (and he didn’t say ‘press’, he gestured it fiercely with a forefinger on his other clenched fist) “… the button. People say … since that is so … why believe anything except … old Grandaddy Despair.” (How inadequate the transcription is; dots for silence cannot reproduce that searching voice. So I desert the punctuation of his voice for the punctuation I was taught; the words mean the same, even if the voice is dead.)

  “It isn’t Despair we feel. It isn’t even fear, not fear of the Big Bomb any rate. The Bomb’s there, we know it’s there, and we’d be fools if we ever forgot it was there. I was born with the Bomb; so were you. Now, it’s inside us. It’s like what men must have felt when they learned the world was round. Everyone may fall off the edge, but it isn’t the Bomb that’s our enemy. The Bomb is our best teacher; it’s not an enemy, it’s not even the godfather of Despair, it’s our teacher. Because it has taught us about time, and about history. And what we’ve learned is this: that for most of our lives, we don’t have Time, but Time has us …” and again came the sudden fierce little gesture, a hand in the air in front of him, grabbing, squeezing and twisting. “And what we’ve got to learn to do, is to do to Time what it has done to us. We’ve got to make Time dance; that’s what the Bomb taught us, to want to make Time dance …

  “Because we know that instead of having a priest cry ‘Dust to dust’ over our graves, we can have nothing but the wind sweeping the dust over our unburied cities, no memorial but a few million books no one could read, and a few million songs no one could sing, and a million broken statues no one could see. We change day by day; what I was last year is dead; what England was last year is dead. But do you think the dead people who rule us will recognise that? Hold on, they cry; wait, and change will come. Hold on to History and change will come; remember your fathers and change will come; remember the process of history and change will come. We read our poems that are nothing but blank pages, we play our tunes on violins that have no strings, we make our sculpture that destroys itself as we make it, we act our plays that no one sees because everyone is an actor; and we say, Fuck History, Fuck the Past, Fuck Fathers, we want change now. And we say we’ll burn down this city and tear down this State, so we can build something new; and we’ll start by building houses people can live in, houses from which these people can see those people. We’ve taken Time by the tail and said to him, Run, old man, run, because if you don’t, we shall drag you where we want by your tail. We’ve got to live in flux, we’ve got to have visions. Because we have only one choice left: we can either have the Bomb or we can have a Vision; we can have Apocalypse or we can have Millennium.

  “There are even some of us who say, rather Apocalypse than what we have now; rather drop the Bomb now and clear the world, than go on with this present mean, woeful, doleful, dirty, half-alive, quarter-feeling civilisation, where the highest value is what it costs. Because of the Apocalypse one or two dozen people will survive who will remake the world, and remake it so their children can live properly.

  “I don’t see the world that way myself. I know you don’t have a Millennium without some kind of Apocalypse first, just as I know the first time you make love to a girl she bleeds. Before we make Time dance, we’ve got to teach him to stop running; and that means we’ve got to kick him and beat him and if necessary fire some bullets into the air in front of his nose. But we have to be careful about killing that poor old beast of burden, as we would if we dropped the Bomb on him; because no one knows whether the beast would be able to dance at all after the Bomb has finished his running.

  “But I tell you, Time will stop; and Time will dance for us—and we’ll forget he was ever an old man, crazed with too much remembering, and we’ll stop putting all our burdens on his back as if we expected him to carry the world and still run for us. I remember when I was a kid I used to go to Hyde Park to listen to the speakers; and there was one man, a crazy man I suppose—or he was the only sane man there and the people who laughed at him were crazy—and he wore his hair like we wear ours now, and he wore a black suit (that was because he thought he was a sinner)—and he wore a white tie (that was because he thought he was, in a little part of him, the real God)—and he carried a big black book, and he talked about the City of God. And he had the whole thing right, too, except for one thing, or maybe two: he thought the City he had seen—and it was a real City, of colour and light and singing and noise where you needed it and quiet where you needed it—he thought the City was up there, and you only got it when you were dead. I have the same vision, except mine is not of a City of God, but a City of Men; and my city isn’t up there, it’s down here, it’s right where we are standing now.

  “Oh, there are lots of people who say it’s impossible, my City of Men; they say a vision is the same as a lie, that we don’t know enough, we aren’t clever enough, or we can’t because—like the old man used to think—we aren’t good enough, we are too much sinners. And then they say we are the children of Despair. I don’t believe in their kind of sins; and we’re clever enough to put people on the moon, and we know enough to make bombs and diseases in little bottles that can kill a million people at a time. And if we used that cleverness and that knowledge and used the goodness we had before the old men caught hold of us and put us in schools and in churches and taught us we were sinners, we could build that City of Men. Couldn’t we?” And now he took his hands from his sides and spread his arms wide to include his audience in his vision. Then quickly he let them fall to his sides again. “I’ve done enough talking; you tell me the answer. Could we build that City?”

  Quietly at first, then louder, the crowd growled, “Yes.”

  “Yes; that’s our answer. And you know, just down the road there, in an old building History made, there are men who think they know the answers to all the questions. And they are probably talking right now, about History and about the Future and
about Money”—and now his voice was louder too, because the audience was stirring and whispering—“but the real future of England is here, where you are, not where those old men are speaking their educated nonsense. And our answer is Yes, we can do it; yes, we can build that City.” He was shouting now, yelling almost, and his arms were spread wide. Very slowly he dropped his arms, and almost whispered, “Say it again: can we build our City? Can we build it here and now?” and the crowd whispered back to him, “Yes,” and then suddenly, in the realisation they were whispering, where he wanted a shout, they shouted, “Yes, yes, yes,” and John shouted back to them, like a gospel preacher, “Yes.”

  I suppose he could have stood there shouting ‘Yes’ to the audience seven or eight times, and each time he would have got his ‘Yes’ in reply, more excited each time, more committed to following him to his City. But while the second ‘Yes’ was still in the air, he left the platform and walked through the crowd towards the back of the Roundhouse. The crowd watched him go in complete silence, so you could hear his feet on the hard floor; and for a moment or longer I had the hope the crowd might let him go right out of their sight in silence, but then some fool clapped, and another joined him, and someone whistled, and another stamped his feet, and another cheered, and everyone stood up—except one Thomas Grace and perhaps a policeman or two—and they cheered and shouted and stamped and clapped and whistled and some went on shouting ‘Yes’.

  And then … and then … and then … nothing. They did not gather up their sleeping-bags and guitars and march on Westminster; they did not go out into the streets to fight the police, pull down the flags, attack the Houses of Parliament, desecrate a cathedral, occupy banks and hand out money free to passers-by. They did not collect rifles from trucks parked round the back streets of Camden, they did not collect paving-stones for barricades, or burn buses, or run riot through the city. They stood to cheer John Buckleson—and then they sat down again, and watched John leave the body of the Freedom Congress, and some of them swarmed round him and hugged and kissed him. Oh, he was a great man all right; he could have been a great soccer-player leaving the field after scoring a winning goal, he could have been a pop singer being mobbed at a concert, he could have been a poet reading to five hundred thousand in Red Square.